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Dick Bakken

Ink that echoes

Poetry is not made out of thoughts any more than painting is made out of objects. The poet's medium is not ideas — just like the painter's is not things — horses, ballerinas, lily pads. The primary material the painter works with is light.

The painter manipulates pigment to manifest color, shadow, texture, and other effects of light. As you learned in grammar school it is light that carries everything brought to us through our eyes. If a painter has no feel for the properties of light, she might as well be blind.

And the poet — even if not as masterful as Homer or Milton — must have an ear. That's right — the medium for poetry is sound. Rhyme, rhythm, meter, assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and all the rest of those terms name qualities of sound.

Counting-out Rhyme

Silver bark of beech, and sallow
Bark of yellow birch and yellow
Twig of willow.

Stripe of green in moosewood maple,
Color seen in leaf of apple,
Bark of popple.

Wood of popple pale as moonbeam,
Wood of oak for yoke and barn-beam,
Wood of hornbeam.

Silver bark of beech, and hollow
Stem of elder, tall and yellow
Twig of willow.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-
1950), poem first published in 1928

Now look at the poem and ask What does it mean? Surely you see how absurd this question is! John Ciardi, in his popular textbook published in 1959, says this is always the wrong question — because "No poem 'means' anything that any paraphrase is capable of saying."

The title of Ciardi's textbook is How Does a Poem Mean? That, he says, is the proper question to ask. It will lead you not into trying to paraphrase a poem but into hearing how the various unfolding qualities of the poem itself are the meaning.

Edna St. Vincent Millay obviously makes "Counting-Out Rhyme" out of sound. Using sound she even paints images ("Silver bark of beech," "Stripe of green," "pale as moonbeam," etc.) that trigger actual physical operation of your vision — within you.

She embodies qualities of wood simultaneously in the visual and the auditory. Via pure sound you feel as experience a rippling, overlapping, repeating pattern so naturally ingrained in wood, bark, twig, and leaf.

In fact, if you divorce such a poem from sound — which you must do to paraphrase — you suddenly lose the meaning of the poem.

Poem

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down

into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot.

— W.C. Williams (1883-1963),
poem first published in 1934

What does it mean? Hah! And compared to Edna St. Vincent Millay's, this poem may seem soundless. Uh-huh. Like a fox.

Williams' precise monosyllabic syntax — so lucid — with painstakingly placed line breaks, brings alive the sure focused motion of a cat's stepping — by evoking it as experience within your own physical body.

If you write this poem word for word across a blackboard in one long line, you lose a dramatic part of its meaning. The vanished line breaks are meaning you must see, feel, experience, that cannot be paraphrased to answer the perennial wrong question What does it mean?

In How Does a Poem Mean? Ciardi tells what advice W. H. Auden would give to someone who aspired to be a poet. Auden would first ask the young aspirant why he wished to become a poet. "If the answer was 'because I have something important to say,' Auden would conclude that there was no hope for the young man as a poet."

The masterful W. H. valued that much more the ear than the mind.

Dick Bakken's poetry column Ink that Echoes will be found here in each new issue of The Marquee. This particular piece was published originally in The Bisbee News, February 26, 1998. Republished with permission. - ed